New custom Squirrelcart theme for Replacement Glass

Finished up another piece of consulting web development work a week or two ago, another Squirrelcart e-commerce theme for a cool little niche online seller, Lampglass.nu – Replacement Glass Lamp Shades .

Picked up Tunnel Hunt & Red Baron for $40

I got lucky again. Last Wednesday night I sat down in front of the laptop to do something really quick, pulled up my feeds and a listing for a garage sale came up two minutes later. The listing said that there were a couple of arcade games that needed some work. I emailed asking which games they were, thinking surely it was a Final Fight and a bad X-Men conversion. I got an email back Thursday morning saying – Tunnel Hunt and Red Baron!!!

Problems still with my Hyperball pinball

This weekend Chris brought down a bunch of games and some other goodies, including a my Hyperball MPU and Driver boards. A tech friend that I trust that knows what he’s doing did a diagnostic on the boards and made sure they were working. But when we powered on the Hyperball machine hoping to go mad shooting 55 pinballs at high speed we still had some issues. I am trying to figure things out for myself and here are my thoughts so far.

Picked up a Stern Wild Fyre Pinball this weekend

I had been in touch with a gal here in Indianapolis (originally through this website) since May about this 1978 Stern Wild Fyre, but it wasn’t until Thursday night that I realized they weren’t in southern Greenwood but only two miles away. This weekend Chris was down for a visit and I had rented a trailer for him to bring down some games, so it was the perfect time to go and pick up this pinball.

Updates / Arcade Finds on Craigslist – 2009-08-16

• Recently changed my commenting system to use IntenseDebate. Is a much richer commenting system, and is an easy to use plugin for WordPress. #
• Armor Attack arcade game (Cinematronics) Chicago IL Craigslist for $175, working. Great deal, rare game, snatch it – http://snipr.com/plaeg #
• Pinbot pinball machine on Indianapolis IndianaCraigslist – $800. Popular pinball by Williams, priced about right – http://snipr.com/pox06 #
• This arcade game blog quietly hit 1,500 posts last night. Always looking for suggestions for topic ideas about

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Beware! My Pengo overlays have arrived

It has been a long project, about 14 months total, but my Pengo overlays arrived in the mail last Saturday, along with a couple of other little items.

Tracing stenciled arcade artwork with vellum

The problem with reproducing arcade cabinet artwork always starts with proximity to the game. Scanning a cabinet is a ton of work, and when combining the stitching in Photoshop of all of the pieces, you might be looking at 6-12 hours on that task alone. The nice thing with stenciled artwork is that the design is usually highly refined and more simplistic, which means it is easier to do a tracing to get the artwork to a workable format. Here are some visuals.